New details about slain protester Amr Kassem shed light on the tangled mess of political and religious leanings tearing Egypt apart.

Amr Kassem, his wife Asmaa Hussein and their young daughter Ruqaya. Kassem, who lived in Toronto, was killed by a sniper during a protest in Alexandria. Kassem shared radical Islamist views on his Facebook page, according to researcher and blogger Jonathan Halevi.

With
Egypt
mired in political uncertainty, the same complex ideological fractures revealed in Cairo’s street battles are creating deep divisions among Egyptians in Canada.

Few can pull themselves away from the news, and even fewer can speak dispassionately about who they believe is to blame for the tangled mess of political and religious affiliations tearing their home country apart.

“Egyptians here are just as divided as they are in Egypt,” said Mohammad Fadel, an associate law professor at the University of Toronto.

Fadel, who left Egypt as a child, said screaming matches have broken out at local mosques due to the “hysteria” gripping Egyptians in the wake of the ouster of President Mohammed Morsi and bloody clashes between his Muslim Brotherhood, the military and everyone else in between.

The deadliest civil unrest in 60 years has so far claimed the lives of 1,000 people, including about 100 soldiers and police.

Among the dead is Canadian permanent resident Amr Kassem, who was killed in protests in Alexandria on Aug. 16, apparently caught at a nexus of competing forces.

Kassem’s wife said her husband was not part of the Muslim Brotherhood, and was demonstrating against the killing of protesters in Cairo that week.

“He felt really strongly about the injustice that was happening. He had these principles in his mind,” Asmaa Hussein
told the Star
.

The nature of Kassem’s principles became clearer last week, when Jonathan Halevi, a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, published a translation of Kassem’s Facebook posts on his blog.

As Halevi
observed
, the 27-year-old father supported Al Nour, Egypt’s ultra-conservative Salafi party, and had changed his profile picture to the black flag of jihad. Halevi described the Salafi party as “extremist.”

According to Kassem’s family, his funeral
was attacked
by men hurling rocks, one of which hit Hussein in the cheek.

Hussein did not respond to requests for comment for this story. But in a blog post she wrote for Muslim Matters, she claimed that the men attacked because they had heard it was an “ikhwani” funeral, the Arabic name for the Muslim Brotherhood.

“(My) husband was not from the ikhwan, he was just a religious man who believed in something called right and wrong,” she wrote.

Determining what happened to Kassem is hardly simple.

As Fadel sees it, his death by sniper is evidence of “totalitarian politics” at play. Although the Salafists supported Morsi’s ouster, their hardline conservatism has made them targets for a military that is painting all Islamists as “terrorists,” Fadel said.

“The military needs to create an internal enemy powerful enough to justify its oppression,” he said. “Once you do that and convince people that everyone around you is your enemies, you are going to have this kind of mass violence.”

The
arrests of Canadians
Tarek Loubani and John Greyson in Cairo on Aug. 16 appear now to have been part of a deepening strategy of branding all dissenters, including left-leaning activists and labour leaders, as Islamists, the New York Times reports.

But Nahla Abdo, a Palestinian-Canadian sociology professor at Carleton University, has a different take. Abdo, who has been glued to Egyptian news broadcasts, said tens of millions of “ordinary” Egyptians took to the streets to show their support for the military to break up large protest camps of the Muslim Brotherhood, who she blamed for the escalation of violence.

“This isn’t really a military coup. This is a coup by the people, who asked for an end to the Muslim Brotherhood,” she said.

Abdo said there are “dangerous” factions among those who identify as Salafists, and cautioned against drawing conclusions about the circumstances surrounding Kassem’s death.

She said most of the Egyptians in Canada who identify as “secular” share her views, while those with more religious backgrounds are on the other side of the debate.

“If you stick to one particular . . . interpretation, you will be in trouble, because I don’t think you will have a comprehensive picture,” she told the Star. “There are different perspectives on what’s happening there.”

Correction- September 16, 2013:
This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly referred to sociology professor Nahla Abdo as being born in Egypt.

With files from The Associated Press

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